Back in Black
I’ve been talking about it for ages, but I finally did it. After 4 false starts, and repeatedly losing motivation, I finally finished a redesign here. You knew I wasn’t going to be posting solely on Vox forever, right? Anyways, sit back and relax, and I’ll give you the grand tour.
The Design
The main ideas behind this design are simplicity, and focus. All unnecessary illustrative elements are gone, there’s no more variation in color or in type than is needed. The heart of this site, the content, is front and center, with metadata (post dates and categories, etc.) and context (sidebar content) given a complementary role. Clean and understated.
The structure is improved as well. Content is archived by category now, as well as by date, so specific content is easier to find. You can browse chronologically, and also by interest.
Oh, and comments are back. I turned them off on the last version, after a deluge of spam and a drought of comments from real, actual humans. So feel free to speak your mind again.
The Backend
There’s a lot more than just surface changes to this redesign. The entire backend has been moved from Movable Type to Wordpress. There were several reasons, but honestly, the biggest one was curiosity. I wanted to learn a new platform, and since I’m starting to dabble in PHP, Wordpress seemed like a great choice. Its dynamic publishing was an improvement over Movable Type’s site-wide rebuilds, and its quick and flexible theming (especially easy, thanks to this tutorial) and plugin system is refreshing. The 5-minute install was also nice.
My plan was to develop the theme and massage the content into shape on my local server, then transfer it over to a fresh install on my web host. Great plan, except for one hitch.
The database backup plugin for Wordpress adds a string that appears to cause SQL errors when you try to re-import. There’s a lot of talk about this on the support forums, but it took me quite a while to find a solution. The culprit is the string “ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1″. You may need to open up your databse dump in a text editor, search for that string, and replace every occurrence with nothing. This worked for me, but your mileage may vary. After that, it was smooth sailing.
A Look Back
This site started out as an idea notepad and sketch blog, when I was considering taking the plunge back into drawing comics. That didn’t last too long, and the focus of the site soon broadened to include more general topics, and ultimately it ended up serving as an outlet for all sorts of writing, from music reviews, to writing about trips I was taking, to just general updates on the state of my life. I’ve posted here for 4 years, from 3 different countries. At some point, the comic related content even split off to it’s own blog, with my girlfriend Serene as a collaborator. I’ve moved this site from blogger, to my ISPs web space, to my own domain, and some of the posts have now been part of three different blogging platforms.
So it looks like this version will be around for a while, and hopefully you’ll be seeing more frequent updates, now that I’m a little more happy with the new setup. Time will tell, of course. Let me know what you think. If you run into any problems, let me know in the comments, or by e-mail.
YAY Dylan!
December 28, 2006 at 1:04 pm